9 ms·
Now that the opioid crisis is a problem for white people, science makes an appearance in the policy discussion. Contrast to the crack epidemic in the 80s: fuck
by kchoudhu 9y ago
Now that the opioid crisis is a problem for white people, science makes an appearance in the policy discussion.
Contrast to the crack epidemic in the 80s: fuck'em, throw them all in prison.
Edit to add: I wish the best of luck to those who have been caught up in this crisis: I'm rooting for you, and I hope every last one of you find the treatment you need. For those of us who aren't affected, it's time for some deep introspection about what we allow our politicians and (yes) our neighbors to get away with.
- TearsInTheRain 9y agoImho i would guess it is more a markets thing than a racial thing. There probably wasn't a whole lot of money to be made in curing an epidemic to a poor minority in the 80s whereas the opioid crisis is hitting a larger middle class population
- kchoudhu 9y agoI hope you see that this is a problem? Why is our society incapable of doing the right thing when there is a market failure?
- ianai 9y agoBecause the moneyed interests have altogether too much power.
- ianai 9y agoThat doesn't make it any better. It's also not a simple A/B. Maybe society had to drag it through the aforementioned stages to reach a point of consciousness. I don't really buy that though. Honestly, I think the problem is simply being on opioids for a week due to post surgery pain or similar is enough to hook people. My write in ballot would include various forms of legalization and treatment. I've heard DMT can make people quit heroin over night. While a little radical, that's better than the alternatives.
- spraak 9y agoIboga can help people quit heroin overnight. And Kratom is a great 'maintenance therapy'
- dogruck 9y agoIt wasn't a "markets thing". Crack hit black communities. Then, black leaders within those communities responded by passing tough laws.
- kchoudhu 9y agoAnd the majority could just as easily have done the right thing and refused to pass the laws, while lending a helping hand and attempting to preserve these communities. You're going through this thread and blaming victims for their misfortune. It is, to say the least, unedifying.
- dogruck 9y agoAh, "blaming victims for their misfortune." You seem cool.
- tptacek 9y agoNo, that's not at all true. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 was passed by an overwhelmingly white Congress and an overwhelmingly white Senate, and signed by overwhelmingly white Ronald Reagan.
- refurb 9y agoThis is the whole "dammed if you do, dammed if you don't". Situation: Crack use climbs in black communities leading to major social problems. Option A: Create tough laws to stop crack use. WRONG, YOU ARE RACIST (for singling out the black community). Option B: Don't create tough laws. WRONG, YOU ARE RACIST (for not caring about the black community).
- swift 9y agoThere are options other than "tough laws" for helping communities struggling with high rates of addiction. Your breakdown of this situation makes it sound like you think it doesn't matter what you do, because someone will call you a racist no matter what. In other words, that accusations of racism are totally arbitrary. That's not true.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jtmcmc 9y agoI would say on the one side that there is still little science in our current policies around drugs and on the other side I would say that many dedicated individuals and organizations like the Drug Policy Alliance have spent immense amounts of energy and money on attempting to get drug policy to reflect science.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- flachsechs 9y agoto be fair when meth was ravaging poor/rural white people nobody really seemed to care much either. in fact it was something of a joke i.e. the "not even once" memes etc. i think the real issue is opiates seem to be heavily affecting affluent suburban and urban people, who are predominantly white, and make up a huge amount of the tax base.
- intopieces 9y agoDoesn't the fact that the "not even once" ads existed in the public consciousness saliently enough to have a meme show that people did really seem to care?
- flachsechs 9y agowell you could say the same thing about 'this is your brain on drugs' when crack was going around. that was also a PSA that entered into the public consciousness and then turned into a joke.
- intopieces 9y agoSure, but one of these was paired with mass incarceration of a certain group of people, associated with laws that were struck down because of their disparity in sentencing. The other, not.
- otakucode 9y agoThat 'this is your brain on drugs' thing with the egg and the skillet was heroin, not crack. I believe they did do a crack update later where the woman took the skillet afterward and destroyed the kitchen with it. To conflate humor and lampooning of those PSAs as not taking the actual drug issue seriously is not wise, though. Many people simply realize how useless, hyperbolic, and ultimately insulting those PSAs were. If something is scary, you show the thing. You don't make up metaphors. Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream most likely prevented more people from ever trying heroin than any government-sponsored PSA ever did.
- guildwriter 9y agoNot to argue that there wasn't and still is racial inequality when it comes to drug enforcement, but how advanced was our understanding on how to treat opiate abuse even by the 1980s? To make things clear, I'm curious about the history of treatment methods involved with addiction. Not about excusing bad policy. I don't know much about the subject but when I try to do a bunch of cursory searches, most of what I find are histories on alcoholism and the variety of treatment methods. As far as I know, before the crack cocaine epidemic, I don't think people really understood just how pernicious the problem of opiate addiction was. Doesn't excuse mass incarceration of black people, but I'm not sure people had any idea on how to actually approach the problem back then. I'm not sure we have a good approach even now. It's also worth noting how small the problem with cocaine and other opiates was in the past. The crack cocaine epidemic was probably the first time the nation as a whole had to learn what this stuff actually was.
- bsder 9y ago> I don't know much about the subject but when I try to do a bunch of cursory searches, most of what I find are histories on alcoholism and the variety of treatment methods. And alcohol is a very strange drug. It doesn't quite work like others. For example, if you block the high, most people quit wanting opioids. That doesn't seem to be true of alcohol. In addition, drying you out from alcohol seems to actually damage the impulse control centers in your brain, so avoiding relapse is much more important. etc. > It's also worth noting how small the problem with cocaine and other opiates was in the past. The crack cocaine epidemic was probably the first time the nation as a whole had to learn what this stuff actually was. I think the real issue is that modern production methods at that point started making far more potent drugs.
- matt4077 9y agoCocaine isn't an opioid.
- yosito 9y agoI'm not saying you're wrong. But turning this into a platform for calling out racial inequality is probably just asking for backlash. Yes, in the future we can apply science more equally to all regardless of race. Yes, we failed in this area in the past. But does that somehow invalidate science, or this research? No.
- kchoudhu 9y agoI think we will find that suburban white folk are backlash-proof. And a good thing too, because they need all the help they can get. That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to feel regret for society's past (and indeed ongoing) failures.
- dqv 9y ago>That doesn't mean I'm not allowed to feel regret for society's past (and indeed ongoing) failures. Agreed. And there is no reconciliation for the damage that has been done (and continues to be done). Politicians don't take this seriously enough. It won't be enough just to reform drug policy. It won't be enough just to free people who were wronged by the system. It's going to take society changing heart and supporting people who have been hurt for years. And the people who were hurt trusting a society that threw them and their family away...
- gozur88 9y ago>Contrast to the crack cocaine epidemic in the 80s: fuck'em, throw them all in prison. That's overly reductive to the point of being wrong. There was never a particularly strong feeling that crack addicts should be thrown in prison any more than other types of addicts. People were strongly in favor of throwing crack dealers in prison because they were turning neighborhoods into war zones as they fought for lucrative turf. And it wasn't just white people, either. The strongest advocates you'll find of drug criminalization are black people who lived through the crack epidemic in the '80s.
- liveoneggs 9y agocrack vs cocaine sentencing doesn't agree with you. It was clearly making the "black" crime of crack possession worse than the "white" crime of coke possession. Obama got a whole law passed in 2010 to address it!
- dogruck 9y agoY'all realize that black legislators and community organizers pushed for and voted for those "racist" crack sentences? They were trying to save their own communities. Edit: for the uninformed down voters: https://www.google.com/amp/amp.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2016/02/why_many_black_politicians_backed_the_1994_crime_bill_championed_by_the.html https://www.google.com/amp/amp.slate.com/articles/news_and_p...
- seabta 9y agoInteresting, I hadn't thought of it that way. I wonder if white people are the only racial group that demonstrate some kind of a preference for other members of their racial group, and if not, what the implications would be if one racial group stopped having such a preference and other racial groups did not follow suit.
- matt4077 9y agoThat reads like a barely veiled attempt to justify racism as something that "everyone does". Because it's well-known that stereotyping works on everyone. And yes, black people can be racist against whites, or also against other blacks. But that doesn't justify anything. In the particular case of the US, it also ignores that white (men) overwhelmingly control the levers of power, answering your question with a resounding "nothing bad".
- seabta 9y agoI assure you I'm not trying to justify anything. I'm just speculating on the consequences of people behaving in certain ways. Would you agree that white men have lost at least some of their control over the levers of power as you call them since the founding of this country when they had total control? Would you agree that it's perfectly possible for white men to lose even more of that power, perhaps even to the point where they are no longer the dominant political force, especially given the changes in demographics in the United States, and especially if white men display a low level of preference for members of their own race? Do you agree that is an outcome which many people consider to be extremely desirable and which many people are working toward achieving? Assuming that other racial groups also show some preference for members of their own group, what do you expect would be the consequence to white people of this choice to show a low level of preference for other members of their own racial group?
- SilverPaladin 9y agoI would agree about it being racism, more like classism.
- rdtsc 9y ago> fuck'em, throw them all in prison. We've heard that before. There is a twist there though. A lot of that "tougher on drugs" legislation was pushed by the poor black community leaders because they saw what crack was doing to their children, young adults, whole families. Normally we'd all want to say it's the white man abusing their privilege in a sadistic manner but sometimes there are some subtleties involved. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2016/02/why_many_black_politicians_backed_the_1994_crime_bill_championed_by_the.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2016/0... Another interesting thing there is that CIA was probably involved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca... Now on paper they "weren't" but given the article from Gary Webb and reading between the lines about what their own Inspector General said "...agency officers were not required to report allegations of drug trafficking involving non-employees, defined as paid and non-paid "assets"—pilots who ferried supplies to the contras, as well as contra officials and others.[49][50]..."
- Zarath 9y agoReally sad that this is the top comment here. How about instead of immediately making it a racial issue, maybe we consider that we've learned something from the crack epidemic of the 80s on how to better deal with such problems? Or we could also consider that the opioid problem is different because the source of such problems is pharmaceutical companies and the doctors prescribing them, rather than some illegal drug smuggling trade. I'm not saying any of these hypotheses are correct, just that immediately making this a race issue does absolutely no good.
- tptacek 9y agoI'd say it does the good of reminding us that where black communities face retributive drug policies, white communities tend instead to get therapeutic drug policy. That seems like an important detail, not an artificial concern.
- Zarath 9y agoI agree with your point but that feels like more of a class issue than a race issue, though of course race and class aren't independent unfortunately.
- tptacek 9y agoNo, it's not. The opiate epidemic, like crack cocaine, is mostly a phenomenon of the lower class. But opiates involve white people and generate therapy, while crack involves black people and generates prison time.
- eropple 9y agoYou are "not saying any of these hypotheses are correct," but boy howdy are you really up on making sure he doesn't put forward one you don't like, yeah? Saying "X is X" does not mean you are "making it X". If you think he's making it a racial issue, you might want to consider that it just might be actually a racial issue.
- deleted 9y ago
- wu_tang_chris 9y ago> Now that the opioid crisis is a problem for white people a lot more people die from opiods than crack. most crack users are white.
- shawndrost 9y agoWow. At the time I'm writing, there are 11 other responses, and they're all unconvinced/opposed/offended regarding the parent comment. I'm embarrassed by the deliberate ignorance on display. Race was and is a key factor in American politics, and in politics everywhere. (I don't know anything about politics in, say, Cambodia, but I can tell you race is a key factor.) The civil rights movement, 20 years before crack was a political issue, faced such powerful opposition that it reversed the polarity of US political parties (causing the former Confederate states to flip to R from D). In this light, sibling responses to the tune of "why do you have to make it about race" or "seems like it was more about X" read as worse than ignorant. You'd have to be willful to be this ignorant about politics. My 2c: Parent comment is so obvious it is inane. But apparently I'm in the wrong here.
- tpallarino 9y agoHow about this? Instead of saying that it's so obvious and that people are "deliberate" in their ignorance, you present some data that support the hypothesis that this is a racial issue.